Dr. Scott McLeod led a lively presentation at breakfast hosted by Learning.com at NECC in June 2009. He asked the question, "Why aren't you (the technology coordinator) having a bigger impact?"

"I really believe district-level technology coordinators are probably putting in more hours and have maybe a broader range of responsibilities than anybody else in this room. The people (tech coordinators) that I meet are very dedicated and hard working. They're really trying their very best in doing a great job for their school in making everything run so smoothly,"

Even when principals and teachers have access to data, they often aren't sure what to do with it. This site is intended to help K-12 educators work with raw student and school data. The tutorials on this site highlight many of the Excel skills that are helpful when working with building- and district-level data. These tutorials are targeted at data managers, principals, school counselors, teachers, and other school personnel who have the responsibility for collecting, analyzing, and reporting K-12 performance data.

In January 2007, I was hired by Springfield Township School District to teach English. One of the first pieces of advice I received was, "Seek out Joyce Valenza." I took this advice and sought out Joyce, the STSD librarian, immediately. Joyce and I collaborated on several lessons and she was always excited to help my class find new ways to approach research and Language Arts. Although it was three years ago, Joyce was ahead of the curve and understood the necessity of information literacy and the importance of emerging technologies and the evolving the library.

Many schools that have adopted a 1:1 program have made the mistake of forgetting the library. The library is the cornerstone of every school and is in a current state of flux. No one knows what to make of the library and some feel it is a relic in the context of schools. New information technologies emerge and the library is soon forgotten or pushed to the side, however, the library has never been more important.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other

The School Technology Needs Assessment (STNA, say "Stenna") was originally developed by SEIR*TEC at SERVE in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's Educational Technology Division, as part of the LANCET project (Looking at North Carolina Educational Technology).

The STNA was created to help building-level planners collect and analyze needs data related to implementation of the NC IMPACT technology integration model, as well as other contemporary frameworks for examining technology use in teaching and learning.

The STNA is typically accessed through a web address unique to each school, using a free online surveying system provided by SERVE. After a the survey has been completed by all staff members, it is closed and the address of a web-based report is provided to the individual responsible for coordinating the needs assessment. For schools preferring other options, a paper-and-pencil copy of the STNA may also be downloaded and freely reproduced for use, or items may be adapted to any other surveying method (e.g., telephone, email, or other web-based system).

What happens when you bring 6 educators and a video game developer together to discuss leadership for the future? Leadership 2.0. Leadership 2.0 is about modeling and facilitating best practices within administrative leadership for the purpose of supporting personalized learning for students, teachers, and fellow administrators. It moves past the status quo to push for reforms on multiple fronts, embracing the modern technologies today rather than relegating it to "the future" and tomorrow's leaders to implement.

Large, mission-critical projects demand more than effective project management skills to ensure the project success. Discover the important role project leadership plays in meeting established goals and objectives.

Expert teachers consciously and unconsciously find ways to orchestrate and coordinate technology, pedagogy, and content into every act of teaching. They flexibly navigate the affordances and constraints of each technology and each possible teaching approach to find solutions that effectively combine content, pedagogy, and technology. They find solutions to complex, dynamic problems of practice by designing curricular solutions that fit their unique goals, situations, and student learners. They use naturally make changes to their pedagogical approach and the content they cover to create a new "curriculum" that is also highly effective.

For Steven L. Paine, state superintendent of schools for West Virginia, 21st century learning is not an option; it's a necessity for students who must go out and compete on a global level. "Students deserve it. The world demands it," he told an audience at the FETC Virtual Conference & Expo, held Thursday. And to make it happen, he said, changes need to be made in the way we assess students and in the way we develop teachers.